C# WebClient DownloadString and DownloadFile giving different results

Question

I am attempting to retrieve some information from a website, parse out a specific item, and then move on with my life.

I noticed that when I check "view source" on the website, the results match with what I see when I use the WebClient class' method of DownloadFile. On the other hand, when I use the DownloadString method, the contents of that string are different from both view source and DownloadFile.

I need DownloadString to return similar contents to view source and DownloadFile. Any suggestions? My relevant code is below:

string criticalPathUrl = "http://blahblahblah&sessionId=" + sessionId;

WebClient wc = new WebClient();
wc.Encoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;

//this is different
string urlContentsString = wc.DownloadString(criticalPathUrl);

//than this
wc.DownloadFile(criticalPathUrl, "rawDlTxt2.txt");

Edit: Please ignore this question as I just didn't scroll up far enough. Ugh. One of those days.

Answer 1

use download data instead of downloadstring and use suitable encoding to convert the string then save the file!

watch details: https://www.pavey.me/2016/04/aspnet-c-downloadstring-vs-downloaddata.html